The Tabut: Mainstreaming Marginalised Religious Festival through Collective Memory

Tabut Bencoolen (abbreviated here on as “Tabut”) is a religious festival in Bengkulu, located in the western coast of South Sumatra, which marks the 10th day of the Islamic month of Muharram, hence the name “Ashura” in other contexts. The Tabut has been performed in Bengkulu for at least five centuries, in memory of the martyrdom of Imam Hussein bin Ali, who is the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, who was massacred along with his family in the fields of Karbala, now Iraq. Imam Hussein’s head was decapitated and brought to Damascus before the repugnant caliph Yazid bin Mu’awiyah, which later symbolized and ultimately crystalized the conflict between the Sunnis and Shias until this very day. But the religious festival is not unique to Bengkulu. Throughout the Islamic world, most parts of Muslim Southeast Asia and Indonesia, that are overwhelmingly Sunnis, the religious festival is called Ashura or Muharram (Java), Tabuik or Hoyak Hussein (West Sumatra), Ma’atenu (North Maluku) and other names (see Sofjan 2013). This paper argues that while the Tabut festival has been mainstream in Bengkulu, with the support of the local government and people, the “collective memory” (Durkheim 1912, Halbwachs 1925 and 1992, Olick and Robbins 1998 and Green 2004), of the participants toward the essential lessons of Imam Hussein’s martyrdom in Karbala had long been lost to the tourism industry, which ardently supports the commodification of the festival. Even the history of the festival or ritual itself, brought about by Syaikh Burhanuddin or Imam Senggolo, is no longer recorded in the collective memory of the local Muslims in Bengkulu. The research questions posed in this paper therefore center on how the Tabut is linked to the Shia tradition, notably on what Formichi and Feener (2015) call “Alid piety”; and how the festival has been used to revive the Muslim collective memory and the reification of the essential struggle against politico-religious oppression.